A month or two ago I reported on the fact that the Chinese were planning to test a Tokamak fusion reactor. That test has now taken place, and has been hailed as a success because the machine managed to produce a plasma. Of course other Tokamak machines have produced plasmas before, but the Chinese have shown that they are up and running. They have plenty of incentive too. Their current energy plan involves building enough new power stations to supply the whole of the UK every year.

Here’s a wonderful thing. Scientists in Lausanne have observed a Bose-Einstein condensate forming at the massively warm temperature of 19 Kelvin. Seriously, that’s warm, because previously the darn things were only thought to exist at absolute zero, which is really hard to recreate in the lab. All manner of wonderful possibilities now exist.

The BBC happily reports that a British company, Icogno, has won the prestigious international Loebner Prize for the most convincingly lifelike AI, for the second year running. This year’s entry from Icogno is known as Joan, and she is a “26-year-old budding writer.” Do you think she has a LiveJournal? Would we know? When she writes her first best-selling fantasy trilogy, will Margaret Atwood let her use that clever remote signing device to help maintain her cover?